So, Lansky had to go about his project largely without institutional support. For many, Yiddish was an unwanted and unwelcome reminder of an immigrant past. Lansky appealed to Jewish institutions to assist with his project of saving the Yiddish books, but there was very little interest from Jewish institutions to assist. He quickly found that the number of individuals and institutions who wanted to donate books was enormous, as was the sheer number of books, which would otherwise be discarded. This caused him to have the idea of asking the broader community for Yiddish books, which he did by putting up signs around his area asking for donations. When Aaron Lansky was a Yiddish student in the late 1970s, he found it difficult to obtain Yiddish Books for his studies. He received a very large number of responses and set out, with a team of volunteers, to retrieve and store the remaining Yiddish books. Lansky felt compelled to preserve the language, and issued a public appeal for unwanted Yiddish books. Thousands of volumes were thus being consigned to dumpsters and a whole literature was in danger of being lost. The books meant nothing to many of those who had inherited them, as they had no knowledge of Yiddish.
An early Yiddish text, written in red within the Hebrew title.Īccording to the book, at age 23 Lansky read that thousands of the few remaining Yiddish books in North America were being discarded by the children of the books' original Yiddish-speaking owners.
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